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ok I pulled the knuckle out off the 79 housing to upgrade to disk and when I pulled the caliper bracket off the spindle to clean eveything up I found out that the dust shield is junk where it is held between the spindle and caliper bracket the material is is almost completly gone......

so my question is how important do y'all think this piece is? I know it keeps things out of your rotor and I also know it is not a nessary thing to have on to make the brakes work but what are your thoughts on them? I looked around but can't find a replacement part. and have thought about just cutting a piece of sheet metal to fit like a spacer and go with it. what do y'all think?

I purposely removed them on my BII. Rocks and stuff always got jammed in them.

did you put in a spacer or just remove them?

ohh wait are you talking about that small round one? It goes on top of the spindle on the chevy stuff. I think I would try to keep that one.

no, the large one........a little larger then the whole rotor. on the ford disk brakes it goes between the cliper bracket and the spindle.

it is the dust shield that is slightly larger then the rotor but small enough to fit inside the rim. it is ment to keep stuff from jamming into the rotor.

on the chevy stuff I think it is part of the caliper bracket......on some of the backing plates it is all one piece. but for the ford knuckle it is a thin piece of stamped sheet metal.

In that case, I think I'd probably toss it. I think the real purpose is to stop the brake dust from getting all over the place.

I haven't seen the ford stuff in awhile, but I think it would be fine to not use it. The caliper should adjust to the depth difference.

Got a pic?

no, but I can snap one in the morning.

I didn't think it would be that big of a deal I just didn't want to run into problems after I put it all together. the good thing is the rotors and pads are like new, and the lines are new because I just replaced them before I took the BII apart, so this swap is going run the price of a set of ball joints. it will also get me better brakes untill I find the chevy stuff

I have now sold enough parts that were left from the BII to put me over what I paid for that 79 I got all this stuff from also.........the wife is real happy with that.

ok, I beat the ball joints out and cleaned everything up and its all ready to paint. here are some pictures:

first pic is how it goes together from left to right knuckle, caliper bracket, dust cover, spindle

this is the part I am going to toss:

so it will basicly look like this:

you can see the dust cover is pretty ate up from rust. when I had the spindles off before to install the 5.13s in the other housing I just left the caliper bracket on the spindle and did it that way, so I had no idea it was as mangled as it is.

I can see what you were talking about that the caliper will adjust itself out, so you think it will be ok?

That looks similiar to the dust shields that came on my '77 EB disk front end, but I don't think mine had the vent holes. Mine were rusted and mangled so I tossed them w/o using any spacer. No problems in my case.